Enclosure, Creagh, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
On the north-eastern edge of Ballinasloe, in gently undulating grassland, there is a circular enclosure that most people walk past without registering it exists at all.
Its presence is known primarily because the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded it as a roughly circular feature approximately thirty-five metres across. Today, what little survives is a degraded scarp, a subtle drop or slope in the ground, visible only along the southern, western, and northern arcs. The rest has vanished entirely from the surface, and a number of later field walls cut straight through what remains of the monument.
Enclosures of this kind are among the most common yet least understood features in the Irish landscape. The term covers everything from early medieval ringforts, which were enclosed farmsteads typically built between the sixth and tenth centuries, to prehistoric ceremonial sites and later stock enclosures. Without excavation, it is rarely possible to assign a confident date or function to a degraded example like this one. What the Ballinasloe enclosure illustrates, quietly and without drama, is how thoroughly the post-medieval agricultural landscape, with its networks of field walls and drainage works, could absorb and overwrite earlier features until only a scarp in the grass remains to suggest something came before.